Unconditional Sin
by King of the Red
Summary: As the events of Villains stagger past, time marches on. Whatever victories were won leave us to become just another memory. What is left for us to do but march on after time? The timekeeper knows the beat: tik tok, tik tok; one step closer to the grave.
1. Chapter 1: Hartsdale

_**I own nothing (save for what I do own, like OCs and original storylines.) All rights legally possible reserved. (C)2008; Copyright to respective owners. (I do not own Heroes or NBC.)**_

_"I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next. Delicious Ambiguity."_

**-Gilda Radner**

**Hartsdale Facility, 2:20 AM, Day 1**

_I sometimes wonder if we did the right thing for the lad, not leaving him alone when he'd asked. He said it wasn't any of our business, that we weren't his family. And a good thing too that we weren't his family, I knew the kid's father, still had the scar to show for it. The kid looked up at me with those shining dark brown watery eyes, as if pleading to all the stars in heaven for some understanding. I understood all right, understood all too well, like I said, I knew his father. However, I also had a job to do, and it had to be done._

_Yeah, that's what I had told myself at the time when I'd done what I'd done, that I had a job to do, regardless of whatever I might be feeling. We were all young in those days, and followed orders without question, ignored our feelings for the sake of serving the greater good. Greater good, yeah that's a laugh._

_Dreams, of the kid, always started out this way, with me back in the old neighborhood with Nicholas, only we're wearing the job's suits rather than the crew's fatigues. I'm there, and the kid starts looking at Nick and I, with those damned big brown eyes, weeping at the thought of being sent back home. Were I the kid, I'd have run away from his home too._

_Then, as I take the kid by the shoulder and start leading him back, the scene changes, and I'm back in basic training, Nick is gone, and the kid has become my father. Same brown eyes though, and I ask him why? Why did it have to be done, surely there was another way? He shouldn't have died. And just when he begins to answer me, right on schedule every damn time in this point of the dream that I have about the kid and my father, just when I should get some answers, I wake up. The phone rings, and I answer. It's the boss, naptime's over, necessity calls. I have another damn job to do. At least these days I don't have to deal with kids._

**-Rafael Ramirez, Senior Assessor, Introspection**

Frowning at the old habit from his old job, senior assessor Rafael Ramirez deleted the log entry from his blackberry; Ramirez was trying to break himself of it. Personal sentiments coloring official records was just bad for business, especially when it was liable to be used against you, and extra especially when you work for clandestine organizations who are rather touchy about any records detailing their shadowy operations to begin with. It was two-twenty in the morning, here in Hartsdale, New York, and Rafael Ramirez had to make his final report to the Board in another two to four hours, which left him very little in the way of time to work. Entering a long hallway through vaunted double doors, Ramirez frowned again, far more darkly this time.

Broken bodies littered the corridor, piled in haphazard disarray like macabre beacons to some long forgotten pagan god of human sacrifice. The scent of them, there, corpses right before they begin to decay, oh so familiar, and yet still all too sickening for Ramirez to bear. Some of them were missing limbs, others faces; which made it easier for Ramirez, not to have those lifeless eyes staring up at him, judging him as if what has happened to them were somehow his fault. Some of them though, were missing most of themselves all together. Dismemberment was bad enough though,if only it had ended there as Ramirez wished, the dismembered were the lucky ones.

It got worse as he had to move on, and thereby encountering the not so lucky ones. Frozen sentinels guarded the main lobby, the corridor opening out onto these human statuaries of flesh and ice. An hour and a half old coating of frost still glistened off their frozen skin. The coldness of that room's electric lighting played across the shining dead faces somehow making being here all the more surreal. Human flesh wasn't meant to shine like that.

A click, clack of shod feet on lobby floor tiles saw Ramirez brought to the center of the room's mayhem, the lobby elevators. One of them was blown wide open, or maybe flown right open was a better term. For the metallic lift doors were doing exactly that, flowing out into the lobby as if comprised of mercury rather than steel. The thought of what that pink stuff mixed in with the metal pulp was made Ramirez dry gag, no piles of broken bodies to be had here, no, but rather pools of them, yes. One of the pools wasn't pink, and far too chunky, it was clear enough that one of the men securing the scene had sicked up before Ramirez could get there. He might have sicked up too, but having forgone dinner for an early night on what was supposed to have been his day off, his stomach was thankfully empty. Ramirez supposed he could have eaten on the flight over from Seattle, but then he definitely would have been sick now. Junior IA members often made that mistake, hence the not so pink puddle.

Stepping over the disconcerting pools of flesh and metal to get to the other, undamaged elevator, the senior assessor began to run the numbers in his head. It was far easier to think of the dead as numbers, otherwise he wouldn't be able to get a single night's sleep ever again. If he started thinking of them as people, (not that he was getting much shuteye as it was,) it would be taking the first steps on a road he had been down before, and he didn't like where it led. It was his job as an IA lackey to assess the totality of the situation, and then relay it back to the higher-ups as succinctly and accurately as possible. In which case for Ramirez, as he stood in the elevator counting, it made the total body count well over a hundred and for the first floor alone no less. Sixty-one male, fifty-seven female, and eleven indeterminate, give or take eleven as a conservative estimate, there just aren't enough pieces to account for everyone.

An irritably cheerful orchestral piece marked the passage of floors up to the top level, where the epicenter of the chaos had taken place, and where the most important elements of the assessment were located. No matter the body count on the rest of the floors or on the facility grounds, which Ramirez would still, have to assess regardless, his primary objectives lay with the senior executive offices on the top floor. It was here that the massacre had come to a climax, and where Ramirez's job got hard. The pristine doors of the undamaged elevator slid open as the lift chimed the final floor. Immediately to Ramirez's right lay the liquefied remains of the other elevator. Any security measures a part of these private executive lifts were not enough to stop the madness here. The metal door puddles were the least noteworthy sights to be seen, however.

Blackened scorch marks marred the floors here and there, raking gouges erupted into the walls and ceiling, and a part of the central floor wasn't even present. It was like the central floor had given way to a gigantic sinkhole, and as Ramirez stepped closer, he concluded that maybe it had. Ridiculous though it might be that a sinkhole should exist on the top floor of a multistoried complex such as this one, it was also ridiculous that so many should have had to die tonight, and for what, because they happened to be the janitorial staff for the wrong building? That they ended up working security detail this night rather than tomorrow? It was a damn good thing that the complex was so nearly empty at night, with only minimal people to occupy it. Had the massacre taken place during the day, the death toll would be closer to a thousand, like it had with the Deveaux attack, rather than this hundred or so; (still, a hundred too many as it was.)

Ramirez grimaced when he saw a particularly large scorch mark where an executive reception desk should have been. A techy was hunched over the spot with a Geiger counter nattering away like the devil set free in Georgia. Then again, that was a suitable image for the destruction here. Partition walls for private offices lay demolished, rubble and debris was scattered every which way, and what little furnishings still existed were far from being intact, or even recognizable.

The destruction became seemingly stranger when one drew closer to the sinkhole, that gaping hole in the center of the floor was more than thirty feet across, and one could see clear through to the level below this one. The offices down there were buried under heaps of sand. Some of that sand was blackened too, like someone had blasted his or her way out of a sand tomb. So where had the sand come from, and where was the missing section of floor? Buried beneath it?

There wasn't time to speculate, Ramirez began studying scorch marks for organic traces. Radioactive or not, some of those smears might have been people, and that made the count closer to two hundred, rather than just one hundred and some. The Board wasn't going to like this, no, not at all. It was a bad day to be with the IA division of the organization. However, bad or not, Ramirez thanked all the stars above that he hadn't been given the Deveaux assignment. This here was bad enough; at least Hartsdale was still standing. There had been nothing, nothing left of the Deveaux building after the raid there; it had all been leveled. Still, after the Deveaux theft, there shouldn't have been any reason for tonight's mess. None of it made any sense. It raised far too many questions to be considered at present, most of them beginning with a: why?

Edging around the rim of the sinkhole, and stepping over glass shards and wood splinters on his way to the latter half of the room, where the most unnerving sight was to be beheld, the senior assessor stopped short with a sudden realization looking down. The wooden pieces came from a fragmented chair. However, as the trail of wood fragments led away from the majority of ruins for the chair, they suddenly became glass shards. Not like from a shattered window, (though there were those too,) but rather as if the chair had been made partly of glass when it was shattered. Ramirez noted similar scatterings of wood to glass shards, as if much of the furnishings had been turned into glass shrapnel. All aimed at where the sinkhole was now.

That mystery aside, on the other end of the sinkhole was by far the most unnerving piece of the puzzle: the corner office where our man in charge should have been. The office was effectively gone now, with the walls collapsing outwards. Now, in an attack climaxing at this very spot, shouldn't an assault have blasted the office walls inward with the assailant trying to get into the office, rather than the reverse? What had pushed the walls outward became obvious however, and this was the unnerving bit rather than the walls themselves. The director of operation's desk was no longer even a desk. Yes, many desks could no longer rightly be called desks destroyed as they were, but this was different. The front of the ornate wooden desk grew into a series of many elongated spikes, which had blasted through the office walls and impaled something beyond in a pre-emptive strike. A desk (with spikes growing out of it) had collapsed those office walls, and now, whatever had been impaled on them was no longer present. Dried blood on the spikes and carpet beneath marked the presence, or lack thereof for the impaled.

Lastly, Ramirez found a solid metal dome formed over what remained of the executive office, with it situated well behind the spike-desk. The dome had many generous scorch markings and frost patches on it, yet remained otherwise intact despite this apparent beating it had taken. The dome looked like no metal Ramirez had ever seen before, and if he had to put a name to it, it was probably one of those man-made artificial elements way down at the bottom of the periodic table, with some name like Uuuium; lots of U's. Whatever force of nature had attacked the Hartsdale facility had busted its way: through a whole slew of people, up a secured elevator shaft, past shrapnel, sand, and spikes, and all to come to this very spot. Only to find _this_, the indurate dome. Ramirez guessed the failure to breach it wouldn't have made the force of nature happy.

With a four AM deadline drawing ever closer, Ramirez forwent more details and had the tech crew start working on finding a way to crack the mystery dome wide open. If they couldn't get into it, then no natural force on earth would either, (which seemed to be the point.)

It was nearly forty-five minutes later, (with Ramirez running the analysis for other floors as he waited,) when the techies at last carved a hole into the thing. From out of it were dragged the limp and unconscious forms of two people, one male and one female. Both appeared to be suffering from the initial stages of hypoxia, and in varying degrees of injury. The younger, the female, was blond and had been further into the dome than the male, as if being protected. Med Techs stated her as having several broken ribs, and massive bruising, but being otherwise okay, (other than the oxygen starvation, but brain damage assessment would have to wait.) Now the elder of the two, the male, was a balding man with glasses (one of the lenses cracked,) and he was by far the worse off. Massive internal damaging the MTs said, as if parts of him inside were missing. Critical elements in his blood were dangerously absent, and so the blood wouldn't clot, and if the internal bleeding went unchecked he'd die sooner rather than later.

When Ramirez went for a closer look at the balding male, he was careful to step around a largish, black scorch mark on the ground, barely paying it any attention with his concern on the identity of the dying man. _Crunch_. Ramirez paused to look down on what he had accidentally stepped on in his haste to avoid the man-sized black smear-stain on the ground. It was, or rather had been, a scorched pair of horn-rimmed glasses lying right next to the stain. _Damn_, concluded Ramirez, as he began thumbing this into his report for the Board, _make that two hundred and _one_ dead. _Ramirez glanced over at the balding man, _and another one to follow._


	2. Chapter 2: Ticking Away

_"Whosoever wishes to know about the world must learn about it in its particular details.  
Knowledge is not intelligence.  
In searching for the truth be ready for the unexpected.  
Change alone is unchanging.  
The same road goes both up and down.  
The beginning of a circle is also its end.  
Not I, but the world says it: all is one.  
And yet everything comes in season."_

**-** **Heraclites of Ephesus**

**Six Months Ago**

Hands quivered in anticipation as the miracle blood began to take affect there in the alleyway. It had been long, oh so long, far, far too long to bear. A stark looking male with an almost avian visage leaned against a building, barely able to contain his deathly exuberance over the prospects to come. The dark male tightened a fist, clenching and unclenching his knuckles as he flexed the tightness of his wrist, his hands drifting to his face to fondle lacerations no longer present on his visage. It was working! Yes, it was working. Miracle blood healed him, but that was only a minor pittance in the bigger and far grander picture. It was with laser aligned intent that the rough, yet virile male extended that same tightness of his wrist, fore played his hand, and then willed something even more miraculous to happen.

Irony was not lost on the recovered man when the can of spinach launched into his grasp, and he handled it with ever so dire amusement, overwhelmed by the return of what had been unjustly rent from him. It was over now though, for he had it back, what was rightfully his was returned. His gifts had returned. _No_. Even more important, _he_ had returned. _I'm ba-ack_, countenanced the starkly featured man, the one who had grasped the can out of thin air with little to no effort and an idle thought. Now that he was reborn, it was time _others_ should share in his renewal, though where his resurrection was a baptism by blood, _they _would know only pain, agony, and endless torment. A reckoning was at hand, and as the corners of the man's pert lips perked up in a grizzly smile, he could almost taste that sweetest of cold fruits even now: retribution.

**Four Months Ago**

Sutherland, NJ, fourteen hundred hours. A man in a dark trencher, with very strong eyebrows, registers with a group of visiting Floridian seniors for a corporate tour of the facilities. It was the type of attraction for people with a lot of free time on their hands, or conversely with very little time on one's hands due to precisely-timed plans. There was a window of opportunity here every fortnight when the systems manager for this area would make his inspections of the armored rooms, which held all of the company's guts and tech for the primary mainframe. The man in black intended to capitalize on this opportunity, when the way would be opened for the systems manager and then _him_.

As the tour of the Sutherland paper plant progressed, the man in black slipped from the group, and into an adjacent janitorial stairwell. His studying of the construction for this place had allowed him to understand how it would be logically laid out. Grasping concepts and using them happened to be a talent of sorts for the man in black. His innate understanding of the place led him to the main access point for the inspection terminal. It was from that terminal that the mainframe was directly accessed, so that its status and integrity could be assessed, and should one be a little more unscrupulous, one could read every bit of protected and encrypted information stored on the paper company's systems unhindered.

A certain list of talented individuals was one such piece of encrypted data. A list comprising thirty years worth of field data and lab analysis of talents, and the people who had them. How to understand and deal with those people, and most importantly where to _find_ them. If all went according to plan, and the man in black believed it would, he could slip into the access terminal exactly when the SM made his routine entry, and the way would be open to a very important afternoon-reading session. As the minutes ticked away to fourteen-thirty, a swirl of black trencher and then a muffled gurgle was the last any were to hear of the systems manager alive. Of course, unfortunately for the man and black, and too late for the SM, things don't always go according to your plans….

**Three Months Ago**

A partial family lay slain in the den of their south Cali home, their decor was one of both posh and privilege, yet at the same time strikingly impoverished. What may have been a whole room was now distinctly empty, oh sure there were still many nice things to be seen in places, but the use of negative space bespoke of what should of been yet was no longer. No laughter from the sounds of children, no pitter-patter from their tiny feet. Children were gone, and of their parents, well they were gone too, but not as far. A once plush and beatific white rug was now indelibly marred crimson, and two obsequious mounds of cooling flesh defiled it all the further. The mounds had once been the living and breathing bodies of Anthony and Rosemary Travers, and now... Well now, _they_ were the negative space.

One could trace the flourishes of crimson from out of the pools on the carpet, up the contours of pallid decomposing faces, and through to hollow sockets. Empty third eyes which never blinked cried with red rivulets, though all the crimson had dried now. GSR decorated the third sockets, eyeless, in each parents' head, much like sleeping sand might decorate their two regular eyes when waking. Of course, the presence of the empty third eye meant that neither would ever wake again. Children, asleep in the back of a white van making rapid progress for a private plane waiting at a nearby air port, would wake given time, though.

A woman and her partner sat in the front seat, each one sitting in a cold silence as the children slept. Neither liked dealing with ones so young, but sometimes hard tasks became necessary. The woman was not new to hard tasks per say, but she was nothing compared to her partner; he had made a career of it. Houses blurred past them through the tinted van windows on either side, with none of the occupants of those houses having any idea of the preciousness of the cargo contained within that bleached vehicle. A cartoon catfish smiling with a grin full of whiskers and holding a monkey wrench was plastered on the side, proclaiming Piche-Mart Plumbing Supplies, 'best discount prices this side of Fresno.' Neither the woman at the wheel nor her partner were anywhere near as happy as that grinning fish whose smile never quite touched his cartoon eyes. Neither smiled, neither talked, neither were aware of the dark rider in pursuit. The woman drove on, and her partner kept himself busy with cleaning his horn-rimmed glasses.

**Two Months Ago**

Though many had lost their way from the path of the righteous, darkness had not fallen upon every heart in the land. And so a brave few set out to combat the rising evils of the world, with the newly re-arisen watchmaker's son the greatest among them. Like a tide of unconditional sin, evil seemed to spread through the hearts of women and men, causing them to do wicked things to those they loved, and worse to those whom they did not. It was the righteous few who stood against them, and ultimately led to the salvation of many whom were previously pronounced fallen to the darkness. Redemption was not impossible, only exceedingly difficult to obtain. Among the redeemed, didst not the Watchmaker's son stand? Answer be not, and no.

**One-Month Ago**

Sirens blared in the heart of New York City, a flaming funeral pyre set off well wishes for the dead. It had once been what most took to be a simple apartment complex owned by a wealthy and also dead man. Now, it was a tower of rubble and ruin, fire having gutted most of the building as it collapsed under the strains of instability. Police formed a barricade around the perimeter against the mollified public. Firemen in their bright orange and yellow fatigues battled the smoldering blaze, attempting to subdue the flames so that the rescue efforts could be done. The flashing lights of ambulances waited near by, med teams wanting to take up any survivors as soon as possible. Too bad for them that there were to be no survivors; (none who needed their saving anyway.)

From a rooftop perspective many buildings away, a man who once bore the name Gabriel Gray watched on with pleasure and a settling anxiety. For once in his life everything had gone his way, or at least as good as. While it had not been his intensions to see the building full of innocent residents collapse right on top of him, it became unavoidable when _they_ had refused to give him what he sought. _They_ not being the residents above, but rather the inhabitants of the Archives below. It stilled defied logic that any should defy his wishes, when clearly he was so much the superior to them. They were at the bottom of the ladder; evolution had picked him to be the forefront in advancement. It had to be jealousy concluded the stark male formerly known as Gabriel. Jealousy over the fact that he was evolving, where as they remained obsolete, left behind in the dark compared to his own personal age of enlightenment.

And bright_ it_ was, as a particularly bright plume of fire gusted up with another piece of the smoldering ruin collapsing onto the already toppled pile of burning rubble. It took several men in orange and yellow with it, the latter lost to a falling hail of wood, charnel, and mortar. So easily human life was snuffed out, as easily as it had been to push through all of the defenses of a supposedly ultimately secure building. In the bottom most sub levels, in many reinforced vaults hid a treasure which the stark male had been so desperate to get his hands on since the good professor had denied him a third time.

Archives of course were never truly secure; their impervious vaults were entirely pregnable. Guards and their guns evaporated under waves of intense irradiation and barriers (be they vaults or walls,) melted just the same under certain scrutinies. In essence, _they_ never stood a chance. _They_ had resisted and so they had died, the rest was simply collateral.

Whatever anxiety the semi-avian faced man felt over such an unnecessary loss of life, on such a large scale, (over a thousand innocents taken by the collapsing blaze,) it was but a small pang. One, which the stark male was barely even aware of now, his own consciousness becoming calloused against such distractions. What he has sought: the object of his desperations now lay within the bowls of a non-descript sports bag, which the male had strung carefully over his shoulder. It was the necessary key to his personal ascension and since the mainframe had gone prematurely and permanently offline in Sutherland, it was now necessary that he take the heart of the Archives. The man they now called Sylar smiled contentedly and departed now that his new journey had just truly begun.


	3. Chapter 3: Exchanges

_"It is the duty of men to judge men only by their actions. Our faculties furnish us with no means of arriving at the motive, the character, the secret self. We call the tree good from its fruits, and the man, from his works."_

**-Ralph Waldo Emerson, sermon, October 15, 1826**

**Somewhere in Upstate New York, Thirty-Six Hours Post-Hartsdale, Day 2**

A hard sun climbed slowly over the sleepy dell, a brushing gale excused itself passed every branch and leaf, the gentle swaying the telltale sign of its passing. In the furrowed glen was cut a swath of marsh, the reeds rising up from out of the rippling waters calm to greet the morning sun. A friendly blue-gray mountain loomed over from the background, casting shadows like it was smiling gently down upon the world down below from its frosted heights. The mellow golden disk swelled up on the eastern horizon, whereas in the west a herd of mountain sheep wended their way down from the winter barren highs and into the lush green lows. They had come far to graze in the delight of this sweet grass dell, the pastures making emerald skirts upon the banks of the glade and huddling under the shielding-canopy of the glen's foliaged trees. It was too bad the whole scenic setting was marred by a black Lincoln rolling up a gravel road cutting through the trees, to rest at the haunches of a low hill, which rose up to look out over the marshy glade waters, a picture of tranquility until the thrust of blaring engines.

Motorized cacophony was the mark of the intrusive Lincoln, and an engine with problems; it was matte black from the battering it had taken under tremulous travel upon down-beaten back roads, and at times off roads as well. A rustic log cabin was the black Lincoln's end destination, and as harried as the vehicle might look, its passengers were by far the worst off. Three people the dell's numbers totaled when the vehicle at last pulled up at the base of the hill. Two were for the cabin perched atop that low rise, and the third was for the glade, sleeping. This glade had no fishes however, for the waters were profaned by the bloated slumber of the third. Just as no bubble issued forth from the glade, the roar of the engine died down so that all was once again peaceful. On the surfaces anyway, of men and waters.

A door drew open slowly, and a bedraggled male drew himself from out of the depths of the black motor craft. The key was drawn out of the ignition much the way a knight might draw a sword from its sheath, though the male simply placed the car key in his pocket without much a due; (he was more dangerous than any knight, anyway.) With the needle on a dial deflecting far further to an E than an F, it was with relief on the part of the male that he had arrived here at last when he'd recognized that the needle might have met the E far too quickly. Moving to the front of the vehicle, there was a click and the hood flicked up of its own volition. The male could have pulled a handle under the dash to make the same clicking occur, but why bother?

Smells of motor oil and grit wafted up from a now cooling engine, with a tad too much heat and metal atrophy in places so noted by the male. It took him only a moment to glance at everything, and he understood where the minor dissonant sounds were coming from. Now normally a person wouldn't have heard these noises under the normal mechanical running clamor, but the male was special. Counter intuitively, where the male had forgone the process of manually unlatching the hood instinctively, when it came to actually working on the engine, he rolled up his sleeves and dove right in, almost as if by long habit. The man moved with a fluid precision that was both natural and well practiced at the same time. There was just something about touching and fine tuning an engine that was almost as familiar as fixing watches; perhaps not comforting in it's insignificance, but familiar just the same.

Eleven minutes later the male heard a sudden groan from the vehicle's other occupant, and with the fineness of his hearing attuned to the slightest sounds in the engine, the groan was quite defining. Which was why the male abruptly raised his head without thinking, and there was a loud bang as metal hit cranium, smash. A few pejoratives and expletives later, and the male had wiped off his hands on a rag, and gone to see to the now conscious Lincoln occupant. Where the first male was simply haggard looking from lack of sleep (a condition in relation to hours of driving,) the second was the truly worst off (in comparison to both the former and the Lincoln.) His blue eyes were puffed up, his nose crooked, and one lip was both split and swelling. Bruises and scrapes marred the exodermis of the wakened male, and he was bound in several layers of office tape. A distinct discoloration in the lower extremities of the second male informed on just how tight the makeshift bindings really were. The first male, a man of dark looks and strong features, opened the door without touching it, and reached into the Lincoln to gain a hold on the second, severely beaten male; pulling him out of his seat and dumping him onto the ground.

First-male frowned slightly as the second turned to glare up at him with raw unabashed hatred. It brought a grin to the first man's face to see that emotion, and he kicked the second man in the gut swiftly, enjoying the sickening thud of ribs bruising. The second male took in a sharp intake of breath and winced at that; getting kicked in the ribs can hurt a lot. If not for that deep hatred to cling to, even the battered second male (as hard as he was,) might have given in to the pain. Instead, he simply turned to the first male and spit a mouth pull of blood onto that one's pants, smiling through blood stained teeth and laughing. The second male had dealt with a lot of dark people in his time, and a mere beating, no matter how severe, was only that, just a beating. He wouldn't crack from this, (at least not yet.)

**Hartsdale Facility, Five AM, Day 1**

_What's the point of it all? It's been nothing but murder and mayhem since Linderman died. There used to be procedures, order, and now, well it seems everyone is pulling off everything by the skin of their teeth and not by much even then. Whatever happened to doing things by the book, and keeping it on the level? It's all gotten so personal, so vicious. But then I suppose that's to be expected, I mean now that family is at stake for everyone, how can they not afford to take it personal? And then there's little old me, no family left to speak of, or more correctly: either none left whom I'd ever want to speak to, or none who are presently willing to speak to me. I wonder how Miguel is doing; it's been too long since…!_

**_- Rafael Ramirez, Senior Assessor, Introspection_**

Ramirez sat in about the only intact chair left in the building, and frowned slightly, his eyes staring off into space. Abruptly his front shirt pocket began to vibrate, and he pulled the blackberry from its resting place. Rich brown eyes glanced down on the instant text message speculatively, it seemed he had been summoned at last, and an hour past his supposed contact date. It was nothing new though with a Board stretched halfway round the world, across most time zones, it took them a while to join in on the waiting teleconference. Some might have just woken up, others just planning to go to bed, and everything in between. They could make him wait six hours if they chose really, and there was nothing a simple IA flunky could do about that. It hadn't been that much different in his old job with politicians, but at least they had been predictable. The Board on the other hand was nigh incalculable as to their mindsets. 'Sides, Ramirez knew it wasn't even his place to calculate _them_; just report _to_ them on what they wanted calculated.

A rather large flat screen console appeared as a panel of wall slid back to reveal the viewing construct. It was built into this single surviving office, and bore eight square partitions in the screen, each one having a face within it. Eight, minus one of the nine active members of the Board, were present via teleconference, and their faces ran the gamut from quietly amused to consternation, from offended to distracted, from stone cold to late-riser risen-too-early. A fair mix of ethnicities, they watched him as Ramirez moved from out of a sitting position to stand respectively with his head bowed and arms folded behind his back. There was a small communications device affixed in one of his ears which extended a mike towards his mouth, a mouth whose lips worked into a moist state of preparedness, and a heavy throat cleared. Ramirez raised his head to look at the camera affixed over the wall-mounted flat-screen straight in the lens, effectively looking each board member in the eye.

It was a hard time to be an assessor, since he would not be the first messenger to be shot, and quite literally so, for bringing forth very bad news. The Deveaux Archives would cost enough resources to repair as it was, not counting what couldn't be replaced, and now Ramirez was going to add to the bill. Loss of human life not withstanding for these Boards members, (and it irked Ramirez that it did not withstand,) there were just some things that were one of a kind, and others that once lost, could not be accounted for. Ramirez eased into his assessment delivery with the one bit of good news in the situation, the male and female recovered from the dome were stabilized and healing nicely. This seemed to please a few of the Board members, whereas most remained unmoved or unreadable, save for where one went so far as to flinch ever so slightly. It wasn't that the mild facial flicker should have been noticed, gone so fast so as to never have been, but there was a reason Ramirez had been made an assessor, and a senior one at that, he noticed those sorts of details.

Near as he could tell, it was a rather straightforward assault, the person or persons responsible had stormed the main floor through a rear corridor, and all those in their way were cut down. No metallic trace indicated what kind of blade had been used, other than it had been very precise and very fine. From there, when the corridor had opened up onto a main lobby, the room had been flash frozen by whatever means, and what little resistance had been put up beyond that met liquefaction. The same thing was done to the armored doors of one of the executive lifts; from there the assailant(s) had made there way up the elevator shaft to the top floor. There were no finger or shoe prints to indicate any contact with the shaft walls or cables, so either they had worn gloves or flown up the shaft. At the top level, more liquefaction, and after that, well it became blurry, and far harder to discern. There had been a lot of thermonuclear activity, and then… "Well suffice to say," concluded Ramirez, "Someone made Bob angry. Very, _very _angry."

That got a reaction, it seemed the prospect of Bob angry (and that is to say well and truly angry,) was enough to make even these incalculable people blanch. Bob had been found in a metal dome of his own transmutation, having put himself between an unconscious Elle and the assailant(s). It seemed in desperation, he had risked his own life by using key elements in his own body to make the dome. Ramirez knew the senior Bishop family member to be a demanding and often austere parental figure, but at the end of the day, he was still _a_ father. Ramirez wrapped up his report with an estimation on repairs higher than he would have liked, and a death toll upon final tabulation closer to three hundred than two. Even if the senior assessor wasn't shot for his message, they still effectively grazed him. It would be _his_ job to assess Bob once the balding man was in a state to receive questions. _They_ might not have shot him, but Bob Bishop _still_ might.

**Somewhere in Upstate New York, Thirty-Eight Hours Post-Hartsdale, Day 2**

A splitting headache cracked through the second male's psyche, a perfect match to the new lump on his forehead where a telekinetic blow had knocked him out. He just came awake, and through his puffy lids his sharp blue eyes squinted under a too-bright sun. It wasn't any hangover, but a mal-attentive caretaker who was responsible for this headache, and even mild morning light through cabin window did him harm. About the only thing to pierce through the haze of splitting pain and receding comatose was the smell of fresh cooked eggs. The very concept of that smell was enough to make the second male screw his face up in confusion, and after mumbling 'ow' and failing to bring a hand up to block out the morning light, bits and pieces of memory began to filter through. The abused male recalled where he was and where he had been. With this new surge of coherence, the pain of his headache and the brightness ebbed away a little bit, and he began to gather his bearings.

Right now he sat bound in a hard wooden chair at a rustic little table, in a smallish log cabin that still smelled here and there of sap. The smell of cooking eggs was coming from the caretaker, who was holding the eggs in his hands, and flashing glows of quick irradiation into them. So these eggs weren't cooked so much as nuked, figure that: the supposedly mighty man before him was also a walking microwave. That little factoid would keep himself from thinking about the futility of his own situation. Plus the eggs did smell good. The second male had to cling to every bit of happiness and lightness he could, he knew, or else his captivity would surely break him, no matter how much he might wish otherwise. Of course, bravado was also another useful tool in keeping yourself from breaking, to stay sane and in control. Yeah… in control.

The first male, with his dark eyebrows and cruel smile, was now concentrating on keeping his quick bursts of radiation in check. A collection of charred and blistered black eggs sitting next to the raw white ones on the table gave tale to his earlier experiments. He heard his guest wake up of course, but paid him no mind, having done the latest round of bindings himself. (Though, not wanting to have to drag a handless and footless invalid around, the first male had loosened the second male's bonds somewhat more than in his previous bindings.) There was a strip of tape over the second male's mouth, as it was that he gagged him with a large stone. It would give him peace for now, and it worked, because at last he got the ratio between heat and duration down, so that two steaming eggs were plopped down on a plate in front of the bound male.

While the second male might have made a quip over the inability of his situation to even try to eat those eggs, the second male kept his mouth shut, by choice and by lack of options. Even without the gag, the man realized that he was actually hungry, not having had more than a stick of road jerky in the last day or so. And again, damn him, but those eggs did smell good to his empty belly. It was with passing alarm that the battered male watched the caretaker raise a hand and point at him. His blue eyes were steeled, expecting the worst, but instead of being dismembered right then, he found the tape on his mouth yanked away, and the stone dragged from his maw with all the tenderness of a velociraptor raping a porcupine. 'Eat,' was all that the first male (his caretaker) said, not caring to waste time on the frivolities of conversation. There would be time enough for the second male to start _talking_ later.

As it was, dignity was lower on the bound male's list than starving to death, so without any further prompting, he wolfed down the eggs shell and all, hands free. _Excellent_, preened the first male silently to himself, taking his time to de-shell his own breakfast in this log-sod hovel. It wasn't as ideal as the caretaker might have preferred, but it was remotely isolated, and with no one else around for miles. That more than made up for its lack of descent amenities. Running water came from a pump, which in turn came from a well. No electricity or oil for heating, lighting, or cooking, and it was too warm a time of year to use the stone hearth. But the cellar was cold and full of supplies, and the cabin was properly vacated. The man of dark looks had been here before seeing to that, when making certain _contingencies_. He could hole up here for a while, until he had extracted the information he wanted; the information he _needed_. After that, well then the second male could join the third (the cabin's previous owner,) at the bottom of the glade, as just another bloated corpse. Yes.


End file.
